Health Insurance, Bike Messengers, and my first NYU-published piece

NYU's Pavement Pieces published a story that I wrote for my Reporting and Writing class. The assignment was to take a story on a national election issue and make it local. Health insurance is an issue close to my heart since my family lacked it growing up. I chose to focus on bike messengers in New York City. Here's the lead paragraph:

Eating a turkey burger and munching on French fries at the 7A diner in the East Village, bike messenger Austin Horse, 26, talks about the perils of working in a physically harrowing profession without health insurance. Last January a taxi swerved into his path and ran over his right leg.

Click here to read the full article.

Bike Couriers Without Coverage [Pavement Pieces]

Talking Shop with Hendrik Hertzberg and Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi's political columns for Rolling Stone have become increasing vitriolic to the point of sounding like the rants of a misanthropic mad man. I love them though. His editors let him go where few professional journalists would be willing to stray, including the extended use of masturbatory metaphors. A sample quote from his recent column on "The Lies of Sarah Palin:"

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Tonight I attended a seminar featuring Matt Taibbi and Hendrik Hertzberg, political commentator for another of my favorite magazines The New Yorker, discussing the media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Impressions
Matt Taibbi is goofier and less angry than you would think based on his columns. Conveys his thoughts better on paper than in person. Most stinging quote came in his advice to journalism students: "Journalism school is the most useless thing in the world. Quit immediately." Most interesting life fact: Played pro for the Mongolia Basketball Association in the 1990s.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in a brown corduroy suit and yellow tie, goes by Rik. Is more in love with Obama than most journalists are willing to show. "Obama is potentially another Lincoln." But that's okay because what Hertzberg does is not "objective reporting. It's objective judgment reaching." Most stinging quote (from my perspective as a blogger): "Reporting is expensive. The web is feeding on the corpse of the mainstream media. Just adding snark and commentary."

The Election Coverage
Hertzberg and Taibbi agreed that election coverage is lacking. "TV has pushed politics into the direction of being a spectator's sport," said Taibbi. "Politics used to be about the exchange of ideas. Now it's about winning and numbers."

"But in sports, commentators don't get to decide who won," added Hertzberg, referring to the post-debate round-ups.

On Writing
After graduating from Harvard, Hertzberg passed up a job at the New Yorker to work for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering hippies and the summer of love. After a stint in the Navy, he went to the New Yorker, doing Talk of the Town pieces on music and sports, but he was growing bored with journalism. Left to be a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, and went back to journalism as editor of the New Republic with a new love of politics. "I didn't become a writer until I found a different passion."

Taibbi on his writing style (quotes are approximate): "I get an assignment. Then I will do nothing for a while. I will calculate the shortest time it will take me to write the piece if written in absolute high panic. Then I wait until the last minute and write in a state of sheer white terror."

Hertzberg: "I don't like writing. I like having written."

J School: A month in review

It's a cold, gray, October Sunday, and I am curled up in my Gramercy apartment reading about Joe Louis as a middle-aged man. A month into the journalism master's program at NYU, the most frequent question I get from friends these days is, "How's journalism school?" The answer is, "Good."

That's a bit understated. I really like the program, the professors and my classmates. And I love being in grad school. Having been out in the working world for five years, I have a much greater appreciation for higher education than I had as a high school senior going to college. I no longer see a list of class assignments as a checklist, but as readings and experiences to be savored.

For those curious, here's the extended (and meandering) answer to "How's journalism school?":

Reading about New York in the 1920s through the eyes of New Yorker writers A.J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, and Meyer Berger...

...discussing "press ethics" questions, like "is it okay to clean up quotes? how clean can you make them before you're doing something dirty ethically?"...

...a Saturday night at the Musician's Union Local in midtown Manhattan, interviewing lawyers, anti-war veterans and a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who was born without legs, suffering from second-generation effects of Agent Orange...

...meeting up with uninsured bike messengers at an East Village diner and hearing about using super glue to treat wounds instead of getting stitches...

...falling in love with the work of Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe(!!!)...

..watching the Biden-Palin debate with classmates, enjoying lots of wine and lots of heckling...

...listening to The Week editors digest the debate...

...writing writing writing and trying to master "color"...

...resisting grad school laziness by waking up at 7 a.m. each day to write Above The Law's Morning Docket...

...reading Village Voice articles from the 70s and having Karen Durbin's "On Being a Woman Alone" resonate too deeply...

...excursions with classmates to discuss journalism while indulging in falafel, bubble tea, vegan red velvet cupcakes, and coffee, coffee, coffee (but not all at the same time)...

Palimpsestual New York

During my junior year of college I lived in a Renaissance villa in Sesto Fiorentino, outside of Florence. My two favorite things about the villa were its beautiful courtyard garden (where I spent many an hour struggling to read Dante's Inferno in Italian) and its proximity to hills full of olive groves where I would go running. My favorite course was on Italian film and literature with Professore Vincenzo Binetti. (Il mio corso preferito e' stato sugli filma e letteratura italiani con Professore Vincenzo Binetti.) That's when I fell in love with Bertolucci's Il Conformista, all things Fellini, and Italo Calvino.

Professor Binetti was always using the word "palimpsest." It was sprinkled in his vocabulary as if it were as common a word as "interesting." We students speculated that he had come across it in his Ph.D studies, and assumed it was a common word in English. The first time he used it, we had no idea what it meant. Through trying a variety of spellings on Google, we found its definition: "a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again."

I grew to love the word, and am reminded of it over and over again in New York. The city is like a page that has been rewritten many times. For me, for others, in our experiences, in our literature, in our movies. Standing on a corner, with steam rising from the street, cars and people hurrying about, and iconic buildings rising to touch the sky, the city can easily look like a movie set-- a scene from a Woody Allen film. Or it can take me back to a book's description of the city, as if Stingo should be standing near me watching Sophie. But it's also just a corner, that I need to cross, to get on the subway to head to class.

I don't know the city yet, and don't think I'll ever feel at ease with it the way I did with D.C. It's more challenging, more complex, and more hostile than D.C. Hostile sounds like a bad word. It may just be in my mind because there's a man living in earshot of our apartment who screams obscenities at random times throughout the day. Like right now. I am not sure who he is or if he's actually talking to anyone. There's never a response, though my roommate once yelled back at him to shut up. It didn't work.

This weekend, the independent theater Film Forum was showing a remastered version of The Godfather. I had not seen it in years and had forgotten just how good a movie it is. There is also some enhanced quality of immersion when seeing a film in the city where it is set. This week, that film will be the dominant one layered over my perceptions of the city. Though I hope my week entails much less violence.

I'm Just Not an Alluring Girl

My first college job was way back when, in 1999. After attending Duke's work-study job fair for eager freshmen, I decided I would try my hand working at Duke Recycles. It sounded cool and idealistic, assisting in improving the university's recycling efforts. I lasted two days.

The assisting was a bit too hands on. My first day, I was outside in the hot sun in front of a huge mound of glass bottles and soda cans, hosing them down so they'd be clean enough to be recycled. My second day was spent in a garbage truck collecting the trash from recycling bins around campus. It may have been elitist, but I felt that I hadn't come to college to be a garbageman. After a brief flirtation with camera-work, taping Duke football practice sessions, I settled into a great three-year-long job at Duke Hospital, testing the hearing of newborn babies.

My first job in journalism school has been a similar flop. I started interning with Allure Magazine. Again, I lasted two days.

I had some doubts about a beauty magazine being the right fit for me. But the internship fell into my lap, so I went with it. The first day was quite interesting, with one editor walking around the office on a rampage, screaming and cursing. There were some choice expressions that I'd love to include here... but will choose not to out of a mixture of caution and fear. Very The Devil Wears Prada.

The second day, I was given a writing assignment for the December issue, which was awesome. But as I interviewed a beauty expert about manicure tips, it bothered me that hard-hitting journalism this was not.

So... onto the next thing. Interning at The Week! "All You Need to Know About Everything That Matters."

In other news, my journalism school is getting dinged for "backward thinking" by an undergraduate student on PBS Media Shift. I thought the merits of her original article were questionable. Poor sourcing, and written after just one meeting of the class. What kind of research is that?

But Romenesko picked it up and now it's getting quite a lot of buzz. We haven't discussed it much on campus, but I have a feeling a forum is coming soon. The general attitude among my friends in the graduate program is that the undergraduate student has poor judgment-- in a number of ways. And that we're at NYU J School to learn how to best tell stories, not how to Twitter. The cutting-edge fad stuff can be self-taught and has a limited shelf life. But the ability to craft a compelling narrative is an evergreen skill. That's what we're there for.

Now I'm Institutionalized, instead of Departmentalized?

The journalism folks at NYU have announced a name change at the school. I applied and was admitted to NYU's Department of Journalism. But now it's the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
So, who's this Arthur L. Carter guy? A successful investment banker, he started publishing The New York Observer in 1987. He's an M.B.A., money guy, but he's also taught journalism and philosophy as an adjunct professor at NYU.

In a strange twist in the story, he sold The Observer in 2005 to Jared Kushner, a guy just two months older than me, for $10 million. Kushner is now pursuing his M.B.A. and J.D. at NYU.

I think it's cool to be studying at a "Journalism Institute" instead of just a Department. Sounds more serious and high-falutin'. And I love "high-falutin."

Today, Professor Quigley asked the Reporting and Writing class to start the day at the September 11 tribute in Zuccotti Park, next to the World Trade Center site. My Columbia j-school roommate and I managed to get press passes and access to the park, which was blocked off to everyone but family members and survivors.

Mayor Bloomberg spoke at the beginning. After a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. marking the time of first impact, family members and students started reading names of the victims. The press was restricted to a walled off area to the side of the park, and we could only talk to people standing near the wall. I wrote this post for Above The Law, based on that. But I felt uncomfortable and intrusive interviewing family members, so left after about an hour to talk to those who had gathered outside the fences.

There was a serenely beautiful woman standing across the street from the park, holding a "Where is Osama bin Laden?" sign. One man walking by commented that it was a good question.

Cheryl Stewart is a sculptor; she has created art for the films Love & Lyrics and Across the Universe. She has a similar sign in her yard in Brooklyn, with numbers she changes every morning to count the days that have gone by since 9-11-01. The sign in her yard "is not huge, but as large as it could be without a permit."

While she knows people who died in September 11, her anger stems more from "the attack on the city."

"Everything changed after that," she said.

J School: Week one in review

I had my first week of classes. "Week" this semester means Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be taking all 12 hours of courses in a 26-hour period. Here's the line-up:

Writing and Reporting-- the journalistic technique boot camp. We'll be pitching stories, researching, reporting, and writing. Our first assignment is profiling a fellow student. Next week, our class is scheduled for September 11, so we are going to the New York memorial service to cover the event. Led by Mary Quigley, a former Newsday reporter. (Most of the profs prefer to be called by first name, but she is Professor Quigley to us. Which sounds a little like a Hogwarts teacher from a Harry Potter book.)

Journalistic Traditions-- this is a reading course with the dean of the department, Rob Boynton. We'll be looking back at magazine articles from the ages, starting with The New Yorker articles from the 1920s and 30s, in order to develop a magazine sensibility. And to start seeing magazines as institutions.

Press Ethics-- this is a free-wheeling course on ethical questions in the practice of journalism. Led by former Vanity Fair and now Portfolio writer, David Margolick. He seems to like tangents and an improvisational syllabus.

I am excited for the semester-- I'll be balancing the classes with my continued writing for Above The Law and an internship at Allure magazine.

Fun stuff this week included seeing The Veils and Liam Finn at Bowery Ballroom with my sis and her bf, a wine and cheese reception for grad school students, and a faint smell of gas in my Gramercy apartment that led to two fire trucks paying us a visit.